Forefront Security for Exchange Server Best Practices - During a virus outbreak

Applies to: Forefront Security for Exchange Server

Topic Last Modified: 2007-12-25

During a virus "outbreak" scenario, it is recommended that you enable the Scan on Scanner Update feature in General Options. This causes e-mail to be scanned repeatedly each time your scan engines are updated.

You would not normally select this setting, but if your server has a lot of free capacity and the email experience is not impacted, having this on all the time ensures the best possible level of protection. Keep in mind that selecting this feature can have a considerable performance impact on a busy server, as it leads to significantly more scanning at the Store.

You can also use Background scanning (which applies the latest signatures for the engines chosen for the Realtime scan job) to scan a mailbox server after a known outbreak has occurred. This cleans the server of malware received before protection signatures were available. If additional information is known about certain characteristics of the malicious e-mail, file filters or Sender subject filters may be enabled in the Realtime scan job.